Operational Playbook: How to Migrate Users Off a Defunct Email Provider Without Losing Sales

When a major email provider forces mass re-accounts or goes dark: keep revenue, keep auctions, and keep trust

Hook: Your platform just learned that millions of users from a dominant email provider must re-create accounts, or the provider is experiencing a prolonged outage — and your next auction payout cycle is 48 hours away. Panic-wiring a workaround will lose bids, fail payments, and erode trust. This operational playbook gives a step-by-step, tested runbook to re-verify users, preserve payment continuity, and keep auctions live — without sacrificing security or compliance.

Executive summary — priority actions in the first 120 minutes

Treat the outage or forced re-account event like a flash incident with 3 parallel lanes: Communications, Payments, and Auction continuity. Assign an incident lead for each lane, and start executing this checklist immediately:

1. Run an impacted-user query: detect accounts using the affected provider (domain check, recent bounce flags).
2. Pause non-critical email sends and route essential notifications to backup channels (SMS, push, in-app).
3. Enable payment-fallback: switch to tokenized methods, display urgent in-app prompts to update payment details, and open a manual payment window for high-value sellers/bidders.
4. Put at-risk auctions into a controlled “grace” mode (no final settlement until re-verification or alternative contact confirmed).
5. Start an automated re-verification flow with clear UX copy and fraud controls (rate limits, device signals, KYC triggers).

Why this matters now — 2026 context and trends

In 2026, large providers have blurred identity, storage, and AI services into single accounts. High-profile changes — like Gmail's January 2026 decision to let users change primary addresses and expand AI integrations — have increased account churn and provider-side policy changes. That same consolidation raises outage blast radius and forces platforms to plan for mass re-accounts and long-tailed verification work.

At the same time, regulators and enterprises demand stronger proofs of identity, and payment networks have tightened fraud controls. Your migration strategy must balance speed with security and payment continuity.

Runbook: Stage 0 — Triage & detection (0–30 minutes)

1. Identify affected users

• Query active accounts where email domain matches the defunct provider list (wildcard domains allowed).
• Cross-reference bounce/suppression logs; flag users with recent hard bounces or elevated spam complaints.
• Tag records for prioritization: high-value bidders/sellers, recurring subscribers, newly won auctions.

2. Stop accidental sends

• Place an emergency hold on all bulk and marketing emails to affected domains.
• Only allow critical transactional emails routed through validated secondary channels (more below).

3. Staff and governance

• Declare a cross-functional incident: product ops, payments, trust & safety, support, engineering.
• Assign incident leads and a communications owner. Use a dedicated Slack/room with pinned runbook.

Runbook: Stage 1 — Communication triage (30–120 minutes)

When email reliability is compromised, your UI, SMS, and push channels become mission-critical. Keep messages short, action-focused, and secure.

Notification hierarchy

1. In-app banner and modal (highest open rate for logged-in users).
2. Push notifications (mobile) — short call-to-action to update contact/payment.
3. SMS — reserve for high-value accounts and payment recovery paths.
4. Secondary email providers and social (if users opted in).

Message templates (use plain text and short URLs with UTM tags)

Example in-app modal: "Account at-risk: Your email provider requires re-creating accounts. Verify an alternate contact now to keep bidding and payments uninterrupted. [Verify now]"

Key UX rules: include an expiration or urgency (

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